Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Sales and marketing

By Peter Berger

Published 8:42 pm, Sunday, April 16, 2017

Poor Elijah’s Uncle Lou was in sales. Except the way Lou saw his job, he wasn’t selling anything. He was simply supplying free information. “I just give them the facts,” he’d explain as he savored his footlong cigar.

Of course, this just-the-facts approach didn’t account for the two blondes in bikinis he hired to promote convertibles when he ran the Chrysler dealership.

“Window dressing,” Lou would concede when you mentioned the bikinis.

Like Lou, education reformers claim to deal in facts, “data-driven” facts. That those facts rest on fancy and recycle like skirt lengths doesn’t dampen the certainty with which experts present them as tablet truth from Sinai. Decade after decade authorities and policymakers disarrange and disrupt our schools and promise “success for all students.” Decade after decade their false promises fail, and decade after decade they come back as if they hadn’t.

Twenty years ago parents and taxpayers were treated to Your Handbook, a sixteen page booklet that got tucked in next to Your Walmart Circular in most Vermont newspapers. Your Handbook was one volley in an “information” campaign mounted by Vermont’s Department of Education. Their mission was to translate Vermont’s latest education reform law into simple language that ordinary Vermonters, including apparently a number of ordinary legislators and state officials, could understand.

No matter where you live, it helps to understand how these things work.

The campaign got off to an awkward start when the marketing outfit they hired put a picture of school kids on the cover. Unfortunately, the photo of bright, eager students clearly wasn’t taken in Vermont. You could tell because only one of the children was white, an unlikely occurrence here in the Green Mountains.

The problem wasn’t racial. It was just hard to swallow an allegedly homegrown Vermont education reform law that supposedly sprang from the bosom of Ethan Allen when it came wrapped in an ad campaign that clearly sprang from somewhere else.

Naturally, new education “initiatives” need to be judged by their contents and not by their covers. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time our Department of Education had attempted to sell us ideas that they insisted we’d come up with ourselves.

Their 1994 Help Wanted campaign, for example, was billed as a chance for Vermonters to share their views about education. It definitely wasn’t a public relations scheme. At least that’s what the Department told us.

They didn’t mention that Help Wanted was part of a national promotion designed by a public opinion analyst. According to this fellow, education experts and the public chronically disagree about where American schools should be headed. The public wants a return to skills, content, discipline, and effort. The experts want to continue reforming schools the way they’ve been doing it since 1970. Help Wanted was contrived to “bridge that gap” by circulating commentaries and press releases written by the experts. Guess whose minds were supposed to change.

Then there was our Goals 2000 Committee. Their objective was to convince the public that schools needed to change while they simultaneously convinced teachers that the public wanted schools to change. That kind of forked tongue strategy hardly inspires confidence in an education bureaucracy’s regard for the will of the people it’s supposed to be serving.

And what about our grassroots Vermont Framework statewide curriculum? Despite all the homegrown rhetoric, most of Our Framework was lifted from the performance standards of the New Standards Project, the assessment arm of a turn-of-the-millennium national restructuring enterprise.

Meanwhile our Department of Education gleefully began mandating curricula and instructional practices statewide and testing every student according to goals and objectives decreed by this national conglomerate, by means of the assessment package New Standards had licensed to the testing giant, Harcourt Brace.

So much for parents and communities controlling their schools.

Twenty years ago Your Handbook guaranteed better schools and the blessings of “new child-centered quality standards.” But its touted reforms only wrote into law everything that had been going wrong in education for the preceding thirty years.

Now it’s almost fifty years. Stay tuned for more of the greatest hits of the 1970s.

And student-centered learning begat the old Common Core, and the old Common Core begat child-centered quality standards, which begat the new Common Core, which begat student-directed learning, which begat education quality standards, which begat proficiencies. And the people were told each time that it was their idea, but they remembered it not.

When will we learn? How many generations will it take? The problems at school can’t be solved with “standards,” programs, and “initiatives.” The problems are in our homes and in our character and in the expectation that somehow we can have success without discipline and effort.

No matter where you live and regardless of your thoughts about education, you’ll be hearing more from the experts who govern our schools. They’ll be handing out information, like Lou.

When they do, you need to bear two cautions in mind. First, information is good, as long as it’s accurate, but public school officials are too often in the snake oil and window dressing business.

Second, Lou believed that most people don’t really know what they want. His job was convincing them to want what he was selling.

Maybe that’s a fine way to work if you’re in sales and marketing.

But it’s no way to run a republic or to serve its children.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.